Spice and Wolf 3: Horo the Capitalist

‘Males are all stupid and jealous. And females are stupid to be happy about it.‘ – Horo the wise at 19:58.

Quoted for truth.

Spice and Wolf 3Wolf and Business Sense

One of the things I really enjoy in Spice and Wolf is the fantasy post-renaissance setting. This week Laurence and Horo reach the port town of Pattsio. While I will politely ignore the numerous and conspicuous mistakes in town planning, site location and practicality. As being able to create fantasy environments cheaply is one of the key strengths of animation I do enjoy seeing them try.

Sadly the town is exactly where the director wants to avoid. Just as he managed to suck dry the atmosphere out of village scenes of episode 1, the lack of animation in town would make a zombie seem lively. I felt Takeo Takahashi made the wrong decisions, if he didn’t have the budget to animate crowds, then he should have used different angles. Poor Laurence and Horo might’ve thought they were trapped in Madame Tussauds (Amsterdam branch).

The town is not the only thing that is fake. The much lauded economic theme is also a fraud. While the character interactions are nice to observe while they banter and broke deals, the underlying transaction they are talking about, the deal involving silver coins, doesn’t make sense.

As I be no geek in da histarie of coins, I am liable to cock this up, but I don’t think adding silver to coinage would result in the coin being valued any higher. While it’s true that coins with higher purity is more valuable as bullion, as a unit of exchange, all identical coins must be valued the same. Unless the issuing body (i.e. Bank of Spice and Wolf land) decides to replace one type of coin with a new one, adding silver would just mean adding to the cost of production for no benefits. These new coins would be hoarded while the old coins would remain in circulation. The new coins would also be shaved till they match the silver weight of the old. This is Gresham’s Law.

What I also don’t get is why you’d need the human form of a pagan canine god to measure the content of silver since scales would do just as nicely.